Help:Contributing/citations

RonzzWikiBase has a custom citation mechanism. It is different from those on vanilla wikibase instances, such as Wikipedia.

Why a custom citation mechanism?

On a vanilla wikibase, citation is cubersome: You need to write citation text manually or generate it via a 3rd-party app, then paste it between <ref></ref> tags to create a citation item. Therefore, if you cite the same source on multiple pages, the way to go is to copy and paste the citation text multiple times.

The most scary part comes when you later updates the citation (e.g., because you made a typo). You will need to manually update each one, unless you have a bot account setup and know MediaWiki APIs well enough to do some batch text-op scripting.

To eliminate all the complexity, we purpose-built our custom entity-based citation mechanism.

A citation starts with a citable entity

To create a citation on ronzz-wikibase, you first need a citable entity, which can be a book, a newspaper article, or whatever source you would like to cite.

First search via Special:ItemDisambiguation page by title if the source you would like to cite exists already as an entity on ronzz-wikibase. If so, note its entity number (the number starting with "Q"). If it does not yet exist, you can create it. The entity number will be shown at the end of the guided creation process. Note it. This magic number represents the citable entity across ronzz-wikibase

A citation is declared with <ref>{{#cite:Qxx}}</ref>

You type	You get
Ada was first.<ref>{{#cite:Q96}}</ref>	Ada was first.

That's it. The ronzz-wikibase render engine takes care of everything.

If you ever need to cite multiple sources in one place, simply repeat the entire syntax multiple times. Each source needs its own <ref></ref> wrapping.

The same source cited several times renders ONE footnote. Repeat <ref>{{#cite:Qxx}}</ref> as often as you need — the render engine recognises duplicate sources and merges the footnotes into a single entry with one ↑ backlink per usage (identical to what a named <ref name="..."> would give you). No manual de-duplication needed.

Create bibliography with <references/>

This part is exactly the same as on vanilla wikibase instances such as wikipedia. You simply type at the end of your article:

<references/>

and everything you have cited in the article will be automatically included:

Copy a formatted citation from the item page

Every item page (/wiki/Item:Q1) carries a small toolbar under the title. The Copy citation button copies a ready-to-paste, formatted citation of that item — pick the format from the selector right next to it first:

• APA (the default) — author–date style, e.g. Lovelace, A. (1843). Notes by the Translator.
• Vancouver — numbered style.
• BibTeX — a @book{...} entry for LaTeX bibliographies.
• RIS — a tagged record for reference managers (Zotero, EndNote, …).

The citation text is generated from the item's statements at copy time, so the same source can be copied in any of the four formats. The toolbar also carries Copy embed code (for quotable content items) and, when the item can be edited with a form, Update basic information — see Help:Contributing/import#Re-editing an imported item.

Copy the internal citation from a Source: page

The human-facing page of a source — the Source: page (e.g. Source:Ada Lovelace (Book)) — carries a Copy internal citation button under its title. Clicking it copies the wikitext snippet

<ref>{{#cite:Q42}}</ref>

with the right Q-number for that source, ready to paste into the article you are writing — exactly the hand-typed syntax described above. The button appears on every Source: page that is linked to its item, and also on the Item page of any source item (/wiki/Item:Q1 — the same toolbar row as Copy citation / Copy embed code). Items of source type therefore offer the internal-citation snippet from both surfaces; this matters most for sources without a Source: page at all (a book excerpt is part of a book and never gets its own page — its Item page is where you copy its internal citation from).

The Item-page toolbar's Copy embed code button (for quotable content items — quotations, code snippets, mathematical expressions) offers a choice when clicked: Internal (on-wiki) copies the {{#content:Q42}} parser-function wikitext to show the content inline on any wiki page, External (iframe) copies the <iframe> of Special:Embed for third-party sites. Pick a flavour and it is copied to the clipboard.

See also

• Help:Contributing/entities — the semantic data model behind the citation mechanism
• Help:Contributing — the hub
• Help:Contributing/import — creating the citable source items